


For Love of a Book

by magelette



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:35:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magelette/pseuds/magelette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How can you weigh the value of a historical treasure versus a human life? Dunworthy aims to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Love of a Book

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JanLevine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JanLevine/gifts).



The Twentieth-Century historians never gave him problems. It was always the Medievalists. Well, except for Ned Henry and that whole affair with Verity Kindle and that damned cat. Actually, the cat was the one who had started all of it, just a couple years prior. While Dunworthy had deliberately forgotten the 'old days' of drops and literally flying by the seat of his pants, he couldn't help but shudder whenever a Medievalist stood in front of his desk, face hopeful. Or, in the case of Kivrin and Colin, faces absolutely innocent of any wrong-doing.

"What have you done this time?" While Dunworthy missed Mary Ahrens more and more with each passing year, he couldn't help wonder why her great-nephew had chosen his life to disrupt. At nearly twenty, Colin still tended to look at Dunworthy with something akin to hero-worship in his eyes -- a look Colin usually reserved for Kivrin, now an Oxford Fellow and professor herself. And since Colin now towered over Kivrin by almost half a meter, the two made an almost ridiculous pair.

"We didn't bring a horse back," Colin began, looking up from under a dirty-blond fringe. Like Kivrin, he kept his hair long for that rare occasion when he was allowed to go on a drop. As his tutor, though, Kivrin was a lot more lenient than Dunworthy would've liked, especially since most of the medieval period was still classified as at least an eight.

"Or a cat." Kivrin smiled her impish grin. Dunworthy knew that he would cave as soon as he saw that smile. He'd always had an unprofesional soft spot as far as Kivrin was concerned. It wasn't just that he'd saved her life more than six years ago. She'd reminded him of the boy he had been fifty years before, before the department was officially a department, and before all this 'Bureau of Non-Critical Artifacts' nonsense. Oh, the Bureau.

He groaned. "And what will the Bureau's complaint be today?" Colin likened them to some temporal police agency from that Star Trek show that had been so popular in the twentieth century. Dunworthy knew the reference, even if he didn't understand the specifics.

Kivrin and Colin exchanged a long look, and then Colin leaned down to pick up the carefully-wrapped bundle at his feet.

"We may have gone outside our temporal jurisdiction," Kivrin started. As her specialization covered the tenth through fifteenth centuries, Dunworthy could only imagine what that would mean. While Colin wanted to study the earlier portion of the Middle Ages, he rarely strayed later than the fourteenth century.

"How far outside?" He eyed the bundle as Colin put it on his desk, and then added a second and a third to the collection. They smelled of burnt leather and moldy paper. No, that was parchment. Dunworthy noticed the charred edges of the bundles, and then examined Kivrin and Colin's guilty faces more closely. Both were covered in a fine layer of ash, and their clothing clearly wasn't fifteenth century. In fact, it looked more like-- "The eighteenth century? You went to the eighteenth century? Who authorized this?"

He hoped the answer wouldn't be Lady Schrapnell.

"There was no slippage," Kivrin said in an even, logical voice. "We were able to arrive at the right moment; the continuity didn't try to prevent it." Her hands pulled at the wrappings of the first bundle. Ever since Coventry's completion, the newly formed Bureau had cracked down on the removal of artifacts, animate or inanimate, just because of the increased slippage the department had seen in the past couple years. Each intention now had to be registered with the Bureau and a plethora of forms filed just for the Bureau to consider allowing the object through the drop, as the Bureau wanted to evaluate every incident in terms of risk to both the object and the historian, not to mention the time-space continuum itself. If Dunworthy thought it was a pain to try and plan a drop before, it was ridiculous now. Those regulations hadn't saved Kivrin's life. And yet, disregard for slippage had almost cost both Verity and Ned theirs.

Dunworthy stared as Kivrin revealed an old manuscript, its wood binding still intact, the gold medallion at the center of the cover still bright. Though he wasn't a medieval historian, even Dunworthy had heard of the Cotton library fire. Even he knew what historians had lost when those valuable manuscripts burned.

"Kivrin--"

One by one, Colin and Kivrin unwrapped five priceless manuscripts, smelling vaguely of smoke. "You told us that Elizabeth Bittner was able to bring objects through because they'd ceased to exist in their own space-time. So, we thought..."

Dunworthy buried his face in his hands. "Just tell me you didn't break into the lab." Kivrin was still technically under Brasenose's jurisdiction, and Dunworthy only the head of Balliol's history department. And everyone avoided the Bureau as much as they could.

"Mr. Henry said that the continuum has a second line of defenses, so it would've prevented a collapse anyway," Colin added. "He told me that you'd made a list, a few years ago."

"Alexandria," Kivrin reminded him. "Los Angeles. Lisbon. You forgot the Cotton library."

"The Bureau will have your degrees for this," Dunworthy warned Kivrin and Colin, trying not to stroke the manuscript cover in utmost wonder. "You can't just run around time, willy-nilly, grabbing whatever treasure you like."

"But it was in _danger_ , Mr. Dunworthy," Colin added. "That's absolutely necrotic to let it be...lost like that. And you know that everyone worth anything thinks the regulations are too strict anyway. Bunch of morons, those."

He looked up into the two pairs of earnest blue eyes, wondering when he'd forgotten why he'd risked his life for this temporal nonsense in the first place. It was so easy to become caught up in regulations and stricture that you forgot _why_ you'd gone into the field in the first place. He loved history, and they'd lost so much of their heritage already because it was 'non-essential.' That was why Bitty had broken into the lab all those years ago in order to rescue the bishop's bird stump from the rubble of the cathedral, after all.

"I know," he said softly, unable to meet their eyes now, for fear that they would be able to read the emotion in them. "We'll have to find another way to--" He stopped, hoping they wouldn’t have caught that last bit.

Except this was Kivrin and Colin, and if Dunworthy had any favorites, acknowledged or unacknowledged, they stood before him now and they were incapable of doing any wrong in his eyes. And they knew it. Looking back up at them, he sighed, this time having no qualms about stroking the bejeweled wooden cover of the manuscript and only imagining the treasure that awaited inside.

"We'll have to prepare our proposal for relaxing the rules carefully," he said. He'd been a party to too many academic proposals to run willy-nilly on this one. "Worse comes to worse, we can always blackmail Schrapnell into helping out..."

If they could send an army of historians through time, what treasures could they save? What wonders of the ancient world could they restore? And, more importantly, how could they spin this for the Bureau to get those blasted regulations relaxed? This probably wasn't the first unauthorized acquisition of non-critical objects, just the first that he actually knew about.

"I suppose there's one fight left in me," he grudgingly admitted to his fellow conspirators. "Latimer will have more kittens than Penwiper when he sees these. He may name his next grandchild after you, Kivrin. Or even you, Colin."

As Kivrin and Colin chattered on about proposals and other potential drops, Dunworthy allowed himself to carefully touch the binding on the manuscript with one reverent finger. "What treasures do you hold?" he asked it softly. "What secrets will you tell?"


End file.
